Northern Norway has many of the same issues with daylight as Alaska. For Rjukan, a town nestled into the side of a mountain, no daylight falls for five months of the year because of the shadow of the surrounding mountains. In the early 20th century, a cablecar was built to the peak, so that residents could still get sunlight – and that is still going. But a radical solution involving giant mirrors carried into place by helicopters has been given a green light. The mirrors will be moveable, and solar-powered, tracking the sun across the sky and directing the light at the town square, so that there is always an area bathed in sunlight, even through the dark winter. The project will cost nearly a million dollars, but 80 percent of the funding has been privately raised and the system will run on renewables like solar and wind power.

Human skin is quite remarkable for its ability to sense temperature, pressure, and touch continuously, but that sensor suite has been lacking from electronic designs. A new design of a sensor system from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, uses a skin substitute made of gold nanoparticles and soda bottle plastic to sense touch, humidity, and temperature, with greater touch sensitivity than human skin. The obvious use of this skin-substitute in making prosthetics is exciting enough, but it may also have industrial applications for even more precision in manufacturing.

When operating on a tumor, doctors cut out not only the tumor, but a thin layer of healthy cells around it, just to be certain. But detecting the difference between cancerous and healthy cells is difficult while the surgery is ongoing, causing it to be a slow process. A new device, called the iKnife, modifies a heat scalpel to connect with a mass spectrometer, which takes the scent of the burning cells and determines whether they were healthy or cancerous. It’s been long known that healthy cells and cancer cells have different “scents”, but this is the first device that can make that determination while surgery is ongoing. It’s already been used with 81 cancer patients in the UK, and is hoped to be out of clinical trials as soon as possible.

Type-I Diabetes is a disease associated with a lack of sufficient insulin production in the body, and most people with diabetes must monitor their blood sugar levels, and inject themselves with extra insulin. A new development may mitigate that need significantly; scientists at the University of North Carolina have designed an injectable nanoparticle that automatically releases insulin when blood sugar rises too high. In studies with mice, a single injection sufficed for 10 days of monitor-free blood sugar regulation. In humans, this could significantly reduce the number of injections needed. The nanoparticles rely on creation of a mild acid in glucose-rich environments to release insulin, a similar method to how the pancreas regulates blood sugar levels.

You’ve heard the expression, “You are what you eat”. Due to a recent study, it appears that phrase may have to change to “You think like your gut bacteria eat”. Scientists at UCLA have expressed surprise at the recent results of a human-trial study, where women who ate yoghurt filled with “pro-biotic” bacteria twice a day. The results of that study revealed a strange correlation: the women who ate the yoghurt showed an increase in bloodflow to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, an area that affects cognition, with an offset in bloodflow to the part of the brain that regulates body sensation. This particular study only showed a possibility of gut bacteria affecting cognition, but it may indicate that what we eat affects how we think more directly than we ever thought!

Speaking of eating food, while the “big five” food companies have patents and proprietary secrets over major world crops, there are many crops whose genetic code has remained unresearched and unremarked. Many of these “orphan crops” are primary food crops for African countries, and lack of study has meant a lack of genetic information available to farmers. But the Agriculture director of the Mars corporation hopes to change that. Following in a 2010 decision to make the genetic code of chocolate available to everyone, Howard-Yana Shapiro is planning to work with American and Chinese scientists to sequence and make public the genetic makeup of crops like yams, millet, tef, cassava, and sweet potatoes. Making these genetic sequences available would help farmers identify the best plants to cross for stronger and healthier plants, not to modify the genes directly.